“Sexing-up” victim

Mr Blair’s “admission”:http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=040206000975 that even he was fooled by the ‘sex­ing-up’ of the UK government’s case for war, bad­ly stains the white­wash[⇒ relat­ed sto­ry] that Lord Hut­ton poured over the UK government’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the case for war. The Prime Min­is­ter, too, assumed that the “45-minute” claim about Iraqi WMD readi­ness referred to strate­gic weapons (in fact, the intel­li­gence referred only to the­atre weapons and was wrong, even so). Hut­ton, incred­i­bly, refused to find that the delib­er­ate ambi­gu­i­ty of the UK intel­li­gence report on this issue was an instance of ‘sex­ing-up’ the case for war. Evi­dent­ly, it was sexy enough to fool the Prime Min­is­ter who now says, how­ev­er, that it was not impor­tant. Blair’s claim of igno­rance seems designed to sup­port his asser­tion that the gov­ern­ment did not—or, at least, he did not—approve the use of mate­r­i­al known to be untrue in sup­port­ing the case for war. But it leaves open the very issue to which Hut­ton turned a blind eye: whether the use of mate­r­i­al not known to be true (sin­gle, ques­tion­able source) in a man­ner cal­cu­lat­ed to mis­lead and actu­al­ly mis­lead­ing, amounts to “sex­ing-up”, “over-egging” or, in plain­er words, attempt­ing to fool most of the peo­ple some of the time.

Peter Gallagher

Peter Gallagher is student of piano and photography. He was formerly a senior trade official of the Australian government. For some years after leaving government, he consulted to international organizations, governments and business groups on trade and public policy.

He teaches graduate classes at the University of Adelaide on trade research methods and the role of firms in trade and growth and tweets trade (and other) stuff from @pwgallagher